Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Airline Pilot Spots New ‘Debris,’ Searchers Go Over Same Sites Again

Little more than a week after an airline pilot said he spotted a large chunk of debris that could be from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 — debris floating in the Indian Ocean not far from Reunion Island where the only confirmed piece of the missing plane has actually been found — the official, Australian-led search team is resuming its search for more traces of the vanished Boeing 777-200.

But instead of searching around the Reunion Island region, according to a report on the Australian News.com.au site, the search vessels Furgo Discovery and Furgo Equator will return to the original “Seventh Arc” area about 2,300 miles from Reunion in the Indian Ocean, a region searched for nearly a year without any trace of Flight MH370 turning up.

The two ships will take a closer look at 30 spots in and well beneath the ocean there, spots that they had earlier ruled out as containing any possible wreckage from the disappeared Malaysia Airlines plane. According to the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau, this time around, the boats will be equipped with “higher frequency sonar.”

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014, during an overnight flight that was supposed to take its 239 passengers and crew from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. But the flight cut off all communication with the ground, took a sharp westerly turn and flew for, investigators believe, about seven hours until it ended up, apparently, in the waters of the Indian Ocean.

On July 29, a resident of French-controlled Reunion Island found a chunk of airplane wing known as a “flaperon” washed up on a beach there. About six weeks later, French experts confirmed that the flaperon was indeed a piece of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane — the first physical evidence that the plane even existed.

Then on September 15, the pilot of an Air France flight cruising at about 10,000 feet in an area northwest of Reunion Island reported a large “white object” in the water there. Authorities diverted a nearby merchant ship to check it out, and also ordered a fly-over by a search aircraft, but the object could not be spotted a second time.

But the renewed search efforts will not focus on that area, but rather on the re-inspection of areas the previously proved fruitless.

“The search for MH370 is being conducted thoroughly and to a very high standard and it is important that contacts are comprehensively investigated and considered,” said a statement by the ATSB, the agency in charge of the “official” Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 search effort.

[Image: Getty Images Pool Photo]